Category: Blog: Fall 04

I can’t resist linking to this astounding obituary for harpist Sidonie Goosens, dead at the age of one hundred five. Elgar, she recalled, was "an absolute darling." Courtesy of Leo Carey.

I’ll save my comments on the Met’s sumptuously produced and grandly sung Rodelinda for an upcoming column. In the meantime, read overnight reviews by Hilli Heihmenn at Trill and by Sieglinde’s Diaries, who are blogging the Met with vigor.

I believe I’ve linked more often to AC Douglas’ site than to any other,
Teachout possibly excepted. He has the rare gift of being vastly fun to
read even when he is completely wrong. We have disagreed before on the question of classical
music’s place in the firmament. With a carrot in the
form of generous praise offered before the stick, he proposes to disagree
again. I respectfully decline; I am not interested in writing about
music as a horse race with Beethoven or Charlie Parker out in front. I
ask this, though: if the ideal critic writes about
classical music and nothing but, where would you put G. B.
Shaw? E. T. A. Hoffmann? Wagner? The writer who can encompass more than one realm is the one whose words will resonate longest. The best piece of music criticism I’ve read in a decade was Alan Hollinghurst’s TLS review of the Bayreuth Ring in 2000. Why? Because he didn’t write like a parochial expert; he wrote like the major novelist he is. In an ideal world, poets, presidents, painters, and priests would talk about music, and there would be no critics. We’re just filling the void.

No one seems to have had a go at my little quiz question below. I was quoting from Karl Kraus’ 1905 lecture about the plays of Frank Wedekind: “The great retaliation has begun, the revenge of a man’s
world which has the audacity to punish its own guilt.” Alban Berg was in the audience for Kraus’ lecture and for the ensuing performance of Pandora’s Box, in which the playwright himself played Jack the Ripper. The seed of Lulu, possibly the greatest and certainly the darkest opera of the twentieth century, was planted. There was a heart-tugging romantic side to the evening: Wedekind ended up marrying the actress Tilly Newes, whose character he had slaughtered onstage.

Above is the seating chart for the 1905 performance, with Berg’s place circled. (Courtesy of George Perle’s Lulu book.) He was next to his brother Hermann, who, I recently discovered in a great Google moment, co-invented the Teddy Bear. In 1903 Hermann bought 3000 unsold Steiff bears in Leipzig and put them on sale at Wanamaker’s in New York, where they became a sensation. At one point Alban was going to go to America to join his brother’s firm. It’s difficult to imagine what might have ensued. Perhaps Gershwin would have had a rival.

Karl Kraus was of course the inventor of blogging.

I received an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award yesterday for my article "Ghost Sonata," and I was honored to be in the company of many writers I admire: jazz critic Gary Giddins, whose imposing new collection of reviews I’ll talk about in a separate post; Dean Robert Christgau; Kyle Gann, who won an award for his internet radio station PostClassic; Michael Beckerman, whose New Worlds of Dvorak may be the best book yet about the composer; Denise Von Glahn, whose book The Sounds of Place: Music and the American Cultural Landscape studies neglected links between geography and music; Joseph Dalton, formerly the pathbreaking head of CRI Records, now a critic in Albany; and Henry Fogel, head of the American Symphony Orchestra League. It was great to see Michael Tilson Thomas’ Keeping Score project recognized. The highlight of the evening, though, came when one of the presenters read aloud from James Pegolotti’s highly entertaining biography of the critic, composer, and radio personality Deems Taylor, who gave his name to the awards. In 1923 Taylor found himself in the awkward position of reviewing a concert at which one of his own works was played, and his solution reveals why he won a place among the wits of the Algonquin Round Table:

The novelty of the evening was another of the American works that Henry Hadley is introducing this month, a symphonic poem, "The Siren Song," by Deems Taylor. The work was written in 1912. As George Bernard Shaw points out in the preface to "The Irrational Knot," human beings are entirely renewed every seven years, so that an author may properly treat a twenty-year-old novel of his own as the work of a stranger. Such being the case, perhaps a reviewer may be similarly distant toward his own eleven-year-old symphonic poem. So far as we are concerned, "The Siren Song" is virtually a posthumous work, written by a young man. We thought it a promising work with a certain freshness of feeling and a disarming simplicity of utterance that partly atoned for its lack of well-defined individuality. On the whole, "Siren Song" interested us. We should like to hear more works by the same composer.

From the Birmingham News, via Andrew Sullivan:

An Alabama lawmaker who sought to ban gay marriages now wants to ban novels with gay characters from public libraries,
including university libraries. A bill by Rep. Gerald Allen, R-Cottondale, would prohibit the use
of public funds for "the purchase of textbooks or library materials
that recognize or promote homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle."
Allen said he filed the bill to protect children from the "homosexual
agenda." "Our culture, how we know it today, is under attack from every angle," Allen said in a press conference Tuesday. Allen said that if his bill passes, novels with gay protagonists
and college textbooks that suggest homosexuality is natural would have
to be removed from library shelves and destroyed. "I guess we dig a big hole and dump them in and bury them," he said.

It should be quite a mass grave: Proust, Thomas Mann, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, Evelyn Waugh, Christopher Isherwood, André Gide, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, William S. Burroughs, Jean Genet, Gore Vidal, Mary Renault, Marguerite Yourcenar, and a hundred others, to make a start.

Interesting discussion at AC Douglas, Steve Hicken, and Marcus Maroney of the Juilliard composing prodigy Jay Greenberg, who was interviewed on 60 Minutes this Sunday (I didn’t see the show). I wrote briefly about Jay in my student composers column earlier this year. It’s difficult to evaluate someone so young, and I deliberately kept my comments to a minimum in order not to overhype an extraordinary young man who has yet to make the hazardous transition to maturity. I hope Jay is able to keep an even keel through the storm of publicity that 60 Minutes will bring. The social and cultural pressures for a modern American classical prodigy are so unlike those faced by Mozart that no comparison is possible. Then, the market demanded such a talent; now, the market is hostile. As I once wrote in the Times, if Mozart were alive today, he’d be dead. How about a TV profile of a grown-up composer — say, Steve Reich on the occasion of his seventieth birthday in 2006, highlighting his mammoth influence on every form of contemporary music?

The Venice Baroque Orchestra’s presentation of Andromeda liberata,
by Vivaldi and others, was the first early-music event I’d heard at
Zankel Hall, and, as others have hinted, Baroque bands take to the
space like cats to leftover Thanksgiving turkey. You don’t have that
feeling of listening through the wrong end of the telescope: the music
is full, present, vibrant. For many reasons, this was a very good night. Only the time-stopping aria "Sovvente
il sole" sounds like top-drawer Vivaldi, but it’s a beautifully crafted
score that actually builds romantic suspense as Andromeda and Perseus
work through their relationship issues. Andrea Marcon’s orchestra was,
as expected, a potent mix of precision and swing. Simone
Kermes, who sang Andromeda, is an unusual and powerful talent — a lyric
soprano with an edgy, forceful way of shaping a phrase and an obvious
urge to make the scenery nervous, if not to chew it outright. Ruth
Rosique stepped in at the last moment as Cassiope and showed a gleaming, pure
voice. Marijana Mijanovic, Enrico Onofri, and Max Cencic were also
strong. It was great to hear the audience getting involved in the show
as it went on. Early on, some righteous ignoramus actually shushed his
neighbors after an aria, but by the end people were cheering after
every number. Overall, the evening passed
what my friend Jason Royal calls the Zankel Subway Rumble test: I only
noticed the N / R train once. There’s an excellent DG recording to match.

I recently reported that James Levine, newly ensconced at the Boston
Symphony, seemed to be the object of widespread adulation in Beantown,
despite (or even because) his heavy investment in new-music
programming. Alas, there are now scattered signs of unease, although so
far the contemporary programming doesn’t seem to be the cause of the
trouble. Instead, oddly enough, Levine is drawing criticism from
audiences because of his rehearsal style. From the beginning of its
history, the BSO has regularly opened rehearsals to the public. As
Richard Dyer recently wrote in the Boston Globe,
conductors have traditionally made these open rehearsals little more
than run-throughs — essentially, extra performances for a
reduced fee. Levine, bless his stubborn soul, is actually rehearsing
during the Open Rehearsal. Writes Jean Natick to the editor of the Globe:
“The Boston Symphony Orchestra open rehearsal on Nov. 11 conducted by
James Levine was a disaster. My friends and I understand that Levine is
a perfectionist, but I do not understand why there had to be such an
extraordinarily large number of interruptions… If this type of
rehearsing is to be the norm, we suggest that there be no admission
charge or no audience. It would have been appropriate for Levine to
acknowledge the audience at least once.”

This attitude
is perplexing. Does Ms. Natick want a great orchestra, or merely a
mediocre one? Great orchestras are made in rehearsal. Perhaps the
gripping intensity of the Eroica that night was owed to the
extra burst of rehearsal in the afternoon. Plus, isn’t it interesting
to hear how a one-in-a-million musician like Levine rehearses? In
defense of Ms. Natick, the conductor’s comments on the podium are
apparently all but inaudible, so that to the audience it does sound
like nothing more than stopping and starting. Dyer suggests that Levine
be given a small microphone so his comments can be heard. And, yes, a
little hello or goodbye to the onlookers wouldn’t hurt.